A Remarkable Piece of Journalism on Post-Katrina New Orleans School “Reform” Community Disenfranchisement
Jennifer Berkshire
I do believe I just read the best piece of journalism to date regarding the stunning community disenfranchisement brought about by test-driven school reform in post-Katrina New Orleans.
Published on August 03, 2015, in Salon, the article is entitled, “Reform” makes Broken New Orleans Schools Worse: Race, Charters, testing, and the Real Story After Katrina,” and it is written by my very capable colleague, Jennifer Berkshire.
What one discovers is what is common sense tho those not vested in marketing the marvels of test-score-driven corporate reform:
No fabricated or real test score gains can cleanse (much less heal) the festering sore that is the disenfranchised New Orleans community.
One might as well put expensive band-aids on a cancer and call it “problem solved” as to believe the narrative that It’s Ten Years After Katrina and New Orleans Is Making Progress.
In her Salon article, Berkshire illustrates as much remarkably well.
I am pleased to offer readers an excerpt and to encourage continued reading via a link at the end:
Here is all you need to know about the New Orleans schools before Hurricane Katrina hit, 10 years ago this summer: They were awful. The schools were awful, the school board was awful, the central office was awful—all of them were awful. At a recent conference held to tout the progress made by the schools here since Katrina, Scott Cowan, an early proponent of the all-charter-school model that exists here now, described New Orleans’ pre-storm schools as mired in “unprecedented dysfunction.” In other words, they were awful.The problem with a story like this isn’t just that it leaves out anything that doesn’t fit but that it can be hard to contain once it gets going. Before long, this “awfulizing narrative,” as it was described to me more than once during the 10 days I recently spent in New Orleans, spread past the school yards and central offices, sweeping up in its wake parents, children, indeed the whole hot mess that is New Orleans. The awful story was at the root of the decision to fire 7,000 teachers after the storm, the majority of whom were black New Orleanians and the backbone of the city’s middle class. It is the reason why so few locals can be found among the ranks of education reform groups here. And it is a rarely acknowledged justification for the long school day favored by charters here—10, even 12 hours when you factor in the cross-city bus trips that a choice landscape necessitates.“When you start from the point of view that the communities these kids come from are broken, then the goal becomes to keep kids away from them asA Remarkable Piece of Journalism on Post-Katrina New Orleans School “Reform” Community Disenfranchisement | deutsch29:
